So Many Choices: Grammar [Apps and Web Sites]

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Web sites and apps, the painless way to study Japanese grammar. Ha, ha! Oh, I’m so funny. There is no painless way to study Japanese grammar. Just a lot of hard work and regular study. At some point, the pain lessens as you become more fluent in regular conversations. At least, that’s my theory. If it ever happens to me, I’ll let you know. This list isn’t by any means the full list of what’s out there. It contains entries I’ve had personal experience with. I roughly break these down into the following categories: Websites ImabiThis one is the full course meal. The owner of this site has a grand… Read More

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So Many Choices: Grammar [Books]

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Japanese grammar. You start off studying it thinking, “Say, this isn’t too bad!” And then you get into て form, and adjective conjugations, and set grammar constructions, and then you listen to real Japanese people speaking outside of a classroom, and realise that you know nothing, John Snow. But, you have to learn some kind of rules, so when you go to speak, people can cheerfully smile at you and say 「日本語は上手ですね？」. Japanese people are very polite, you see. This entry is a bit long, so I am going to talk about apps that I use for grammar in a separate post. Books Holy cow, there are a lot of… Read More

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Working the Conditional Form

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Wow, this part of Japanese grammar is SO complicated. So I can use と たら ば なら Obviously, not all can be used, based on the context of the sentence. It’s figuring out the context of the sentence that’s the problem. The way I am trying to learn it is that there is an antecedent part of the sentence, and a consequent part of the sentence. I go to Japan (antecedent) I will visit Osaka and eat a lot (consequent) In English, I’ve got one word for conditional, if. If I go to Japan, I will visit Osaka and eat a lot. In English, there is also the word when,… Read More

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Interesting Japanese Grammar/Vocabulary Site

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So I’m working on a small written project with the help of a Japanese person. And I got a correction of a sentence, with the following added at the end: かよ (Well, I’ve gotten a lot of corrections, but this is the one that triggered this blog post.) So I did the Google search on “kayo particle”, and out of the list of hits, I came across one for Nugalis. This is a Spanish-run site, apparently not updated since August 2016, going by the last News item on the site. But it listed かよ in the Grammar section, with the explanation (sentence-ending particle expressing doubt) It looks like they have… Read More

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